Tara Cheney, the owner of multiple award-winning small businesses, describes herself as “a nurse, an employer, a healer, vice chair of the Guilford Selectboard, an advocate for justice and people, a potential future politician, and member of a 100-year Vermont farm family.”
To Gov. Scott, members of the Vermont Legislature, and Vermont’s elected leaders:
I was born in Vermont. My children were born here. My friends were born here. My colleagues were born here. This year marks 100 years that my family has been a Vermont farm family.
Fifty years ago, that wasn’t particularly unusual. Vermont was built by farm families, tradespeople, small-business owners, laborers, nurses, teachers, mechanics, loggers, contractors, and people who worked with their hands.
That Vermont still very much exists.
But increasingly, the people who make it function cannot afford to live here.
So I am asking our elected officials a very simple question:
How do you expect us to live here?
We are the people working our asses off to pave your roads, plow your parking lots, make your sandwiches, clean your office buildings, repair your cars, build your houses, care for your children, and tend to your wounds.
We are not a quaint part of Vermont’s history.
We are Vermont’s workforce.
And we are exhausted, we are frustrated, and we do not feel like our voices are being heard — or matter.
* * *
If we own our land, why does it feel like we’re renting it?
Property taxes have reached a point where many Vermonters who have worked for decades to own their homes and land outright are frightened that someday they will no longer be able to afford the taxes on them. Our kids cannot afford to be homeowners.
Think about that.
You can work your entire life, pay off your mortgage, and own your property — and you can still face the possibility of losing it because you cannot afford the annual tax bill.
That isn’t sustainable.
Vermont needs comprehensive property-tax reform, not another temporary patch.
I am asking the Legislature to:
• Create meaningful protections for primary residences, working farms, and longtime Vermont property owners.
•Expand income-sensitive property-tax protections so working- and middle-class Vermonters aren’t taxed out of their homes simply because the theoretical value of their property increased.
• Stop treating rapidly increasing property values as though they represent additional disposable income. A house increasing in value doesn’t put money in the owner’s checking account.
• Reform education funding. Vermonters deserve excellent public schools, but the answer cannot simply be sending increasingly unaffordable property-tax bills to homeowners every year.
And if education is a statewide responsibility, then Vermont needs a funding structure that distributes that responsibility fairly while acknowledging that districts have dramatically different enrollment, infrastructure, and operating realities.
* * *
Small businesses need a seat at the table.
Vermont loves to say it supports small businesses, but it does not, and we know it.
Start designing laws around the reality of actually operating one.
It is incredibly difficult to run a small business here.
We struggle to find workers.
We struggle to retain workers.
We struggle to stay compliant and pay all the fees, taxes, insurances, and licenses.
We compete with other states where employees can cross the border for different wages, benefits, and union opportunities.
Some Vermont businesses create year-round work and offer significant overtime simply to retain skilled employees who could otherwise leave the state.
Every additional tax, fee, registration cost, and regulatory requirement matters.
Individually, the government may look at each one and say, “It’s only another few hundred dollars.”
A business owner sees all of them together.
And they add up to tens of thousands of dollars.
* * *
We need to Fix Vermont’s commercial vehicle system.
Here is one extremely obvious example: Commercial vehicle registration.
A seasonal Vermont business may own five dump trucks that work intensively during the construction season and are not used at all during the winter. We pay thousands of dollars to register a vehicle for 12 months and use it for six. Given the additional costs of commercial vehicles and repairs, overweight permits, IFTA, IRP, UCR, FMCSA, USDOT, and the administrative attention and hours to be compliant, how is this fair?
Why should that business be required to maintain expensive annual registrations for commercial vehicles during months when those vehicles aren’t operating?
Why can’t Vermont create practical seasonal commercial registrations that can be made dormant and active again in the Spring, with a click? All commercial vehicle operations transactions are done online now.
Why can’t businesses choose registration periods based upon their operating seasons?
Why can’t commercial registrations be structured around the actual realities of Vermont’s seasonal economy?
These aren’t radical ideas.
They are common-sense changes that could leave thousands of dollars in the hands of Vermont businesses — money that can instead pay an employee, repair a truck, purchase equipment, or keep a company operating.
Review the entire commercial vehicle fee structure.
Review registration costs.
Review overweight and permitting costs.
Review inspection requirements.
Review whether seasonal commercial registrations could be offered.
And put actual trucking, construction, excavation, logging, and agricultural business owners on the committee that reviews them.
* * *
Vermont needs to stop punishing people for building successful businesses!
Vermont should also examine what happens when someone spends years building a business and eventually wants to sell it.
Business owners purchase equipment.
We pay sales and use taxes where applicable, which is on most everything.
We register it.
We insure it.
We repair it.
We pay employees to operate it.
We use it to generate taxable economic activity.
We pay income taxes on the money the business earns.
Then, when an owner eventually sells the company and its assets, there are multiple substantial tax liabilities on a business we’ve already paid taxes on!
Vermont should create meaningful incentives for longtime Vermont business owners who sell locally owned companies. Please read this twice!
Consider reduced state tax treatment or credits when a qualifying Vermont small business is transferred to another Vermont owner, its employees, or the next generation of a Vermont family.
Create incentives for employee ownership.
Create incentives for succession rather than liquidation.
Create incentives for retiring business owners to keep Vermont companies operating as Vermont companies.
If we want locally owned businesses to survive another generation, our tax policy should encourage that outcome.
* * *
You need to stop making policy without the perspective of people who actually do the work.
This may be one of the biggest problems we have.
The people making decisions about small businesses are not always small-business owners.
The people making decisions affecting contractors haven’t necessarily operated a construction company.
The people making decisions affecting farmers haven’t necessarily run a farm.
The people making decisions affecting nurses and healthcare workers haven’t necessarily spent 12 hours working a hospital floor or emergency room.
Education and professional expertise absolutely matter. But so does lived experience.
It is the real-world struggle, stress, and strife that business owners and the Vermont workforce face. Owning and succeeding shouldn’t be this hard, because there is no lack of work to be done. “Vermont Tough,” resilient, strong, tired, fearful, worried, stressed, and sick: These are traits, emotions, and dis-ease processes affecting Vermonters these days.
I’m a serial optimist, but I’m worried for my kids, grandkids, parents, and neighbors, who are brothers and sisters. We need to proactively make it easier and more affordable to live here.
There is knowledge you cannot acquire from a spreadsheet, policy, or college classroom.
You learn it when payroll is due Friday and many customers haven’t paid you.
You learn it when a $200,000 piece of equipment breaks down, you have to get it towed, and you find someone who can work on specialized equipment. Also, that job has to get done, so you have to drive three hours to rent said equipment and it can only be rented by the week or month — if you can rent it at all. One incident like this can disrupt the entire season and bottom line. In many industries, costly and unexpected “fires” have to be put out daily.
You learn it when an employee tells you Massachusetts offered them several dollars more an hour, and your operations manager, paver operator, and best laborer, about to be promoted ... leave. You are all welcome for the training. We can’t match union wages.
You learn it when fuel prices and materials skyrocket, and you have contracts you already bid.
You learn it when you’re trying to keep employees working through a Vermont winter (so they stay for spring). For those on unemployment, Vermont pays less than a third of what they are used to making weekly. Yet, we still pay weekly to unemployment at the highest rates ... even though we don’t lay anyone off.
You learn it when you’re standing in a field and it’s dry or there has been too much rain, the price of seed has quadrupled, and there are no more seasonal workers.
You learn it when you’re underneath a truck, breathing the fumes and needing to get that lump biopsied.
You learn it when you’re on a paving crew in August, hot and hungry, thinking about the crew in overtime, waiting for trucks, because the plant broke down.
And you learn it when you’re working, defeated, in a short-staffed emergency room at 2 a.m.
So many people have comorbid mental health issues that often overlap with addiction. They do not have the long-term resources they need. The ER is a temporary Band-Aid. The healthcare system needs to be people-centered, instead of a corporation where the ones working the double shifts and in the trenches get the crumbs.
Those voices need to be in the room before policy is written — not after it is passed.
* * *
Vermont’s working people need a formal voice. I am asking you to establish a permanent Working Vermonters and Small Business Advisory Council made up primarily of people who actually do this work.
Not lobbyists.
Not simply representatives of large corporations.
Actual Vermont small-business owners, farmers, tradespeople, nurses, mechanics, truckers, contractors, restaurant owners, retailers, manufacturers, and employees.
Require major legislation affecting small businesses to receive a real-world economic-impact review from people who will actually have to comply with it.
Ask them:
•What will this cost?
• How many hours of paperwork will this create?
• Will this make it harder to hire someone?
• Will this make Vermont less competitive with Massachusetts or New Hampshire?
• Will this cause another business owner to close?
And most importantly:
• Is there a simpler way to accomplish the same goal?
* * *
There are two very different Vermonts emerging.
Tourism matters. Ski resorts matter. Breweries matter. Restaurants matter.
Second-home owners contribute significant money to Vermont’s economy. But that cannot become the entire economic vision for this state.
Because someone has to build those houses.
Someone has to pave the road leading to them.
Someone has to plow those roads in February and shovel the path at the condo, so people can get their ski on.
Someone has to repair the furnace. And, what a shortage of tradespeople we have right now. We need plumbers, carpenters, electricians, mechanics, small appliance repair technicians, and the like. Bring back the trades, starting in middle school. We in Vermont need the trades in all schools, and affordable secondary trade schools as an alternative to college.
Someone has to cook the food.
Someone has to clean the hotel room.
Someone has to staff the ambulance.
Someone has to tend to your wounds.
And those people need somewhere to live.
We cannot become a state where wealthy people own Vermont and working people commute into it! That is not Vermont. Workers should be able to afford a home in the state that their labor keeps running.
We aren’t asking Vermont to rescue us. We’re asking Vermont to stop making it unnecessarily difficult for us to survive here.
So instead of another study telling us Vermont is unaffordable, come talk to us.
Come to the farm (while we still have them).
Come to the shop.
Come ride in the dump truck.
Come spend a day with a paving crew.
Come work beside a restaurant owner.
Come sit with the person doing payroll on Thursday night.
Come spend a shift with the nurse who can’t afford to live near the hospital where she works.
Put the people who actually live this reality at the table.
And then do something about it!
Because after 100 years of my family calling Vermont home, I do not want the next generation asking why we couldn’t afford to stay. The thirtysomethings cannot afford to own a home in the state where they live and work. That is a problem and a damn shame.
How do you expect us to live here?
And more importantly: What are you willing to change so that we can?
This Voices Open Letter was submitted to The Commons.
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